Stuff

Hello all,

Sorry, all been a bit quiet from me in blog land this week. Had some house guests (and more on their way). I'm being taken out to dinner by them this evening as a thank you for staying, which is a rare treat for me, and I intend to enjoy it thoroughly.
I have one or two projects on the go which will be blogged about on completion later on this week (unless of course they turn out disastrous, in which case, I will just pretend they never happened and never mention them again).
I have been gardening off and on, weather allowing and the results of that will also be blogged about later this week, Victoria plum tree in, some roses (always wanted climbing roses on my house).
Also later this week I will post a photo of a tree I have in my garden, which I can't identify. If anyone can I would be very grateful.

So lots of promises of things to come but not a lot of action today.

Enjoy your weekend one and all.

Gardening opinions wanted.

I have been working in the garden any spare chance I get while the sun has been shining. It has been lovely!
Here are the photos of what I have been doing.

First tender rhubarb stem appearing.

My bramley apple tree.

2 gooseberry bushes, a nice big healthy plant in the front and a smaller one behind.

2 Blackcurrant bushes.

Now although I am a theoretical gardener, that is, someone who has read a ton of books on the subject, but has not necessarily had tons of practical experience, I am looking for opinions from those of you who are much more knowledgeable

.

As some of you may have noticed, from the photos of my house, there is a section of my garden that is quite sloped (ok, very sloped) If you look at the photos of this post you can see the slope in some of them.

So I want your opinions on how best to use this slope to my advantage and I will tell you what I have been planning. Bearing in mind that I can't afford to do anything that costs much - I am sure there is plenty of great things I could have done if I paid money to put terraces in etc, but I have to do all the work myself on the cheap for now. So far I have planted my 2 gooseberry and 2 blackcurrant bushes on the slope and I was thinking perhaps that it could be a good idea to use the slope for fruit bushes in general, that way, there is initial planting and then they can be left alone more than other things could. I have 2 redcurrant bushes waiting to go in and I would like to add raspberries  to the mix. What would you do with it? Do you think my idea is a decent one and could work? I don't want to cause any damage to the 'structure' of the natural slope and cause the earth to slide or anything like that. All advice and opinions are welcome.

My story, final part.

Hello again everyone and as usual, thank you all for your comments.
First off, for those who asked, here is a link to a brief sound clip of me singing something 'light'. A quick duet encore from Guys and Dolls (not my usual repertoire) with my best friend singing with me (my onstage wife). I only start singing about 2 minutes into the clip. Hope you enjoy, sorry about the cheezy pictures.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFfYD04DYI8


OK, here is the third and final part.

I learnt so much in those two years of saving. I found out how much money was saved by turning everything off at the plug when not in use. I learnt to not heat the house ridiculously and get used to living in a cooler environment. To have throws on the sofa to wrap up in on a cold day, to turn the heat off in the rooms it didn’t matter about and just to heat the rooms I used. I learnt to switch the tap off while I was brushing my teeth and a million other small things. All sounds so simple now, but it was a learning curve at the time.

Finally I did it, saved the £10 grand the month that the flat went on the market and around the time that I started this blog. So now I had £47,000 when it would sell.

I gave myself a budget limit for buying my new house and kept as much to it as was possible. Yes, I could have afforded more, but why should I? I want to be mortgage free, I don't want to owe anything to anybody and I want to live my life peacefully with security. I don't need a massive house filled with the latest gadgets. I need somewhere to sleep, somewhere to have friends round, somewhere with room too cook and a garden to grow.

So my final bit of advice to anyone who wants to downsize in their life and spending, to live a better life and to get closer to nature is to just do it! Don’t get sucked into commercialism, learn to laugh at how ludicrous advertisements are, once you get into the habit of looking how they work, you realise what nonsense it all is. Don’t get sucked into random supermarket shopping, don’t be embarrassed to buy nothing but value ranges if necessary or yellow label food, learn how supermarkets work, they just want to part you with your money, they don't need to be the cheapest, they just need us to believe they are the cheapest, which means that we have to do the hard work of knowing where to go for what. Don’t be embarssed to say to friends, NO, I don’t want to go out for dinner because I can’t afford it, but hey, why don’t you come over to mine for dinner instead? Try living on the bare minimum for a month and then once you have done it, cut the budget down again to push yourself even further. Stop buying alcohol, it is a real money drain, so just have it on special occasions, or better still, try making your own, forage for some of the free items you can use for nettle beer or blackberry wine. Get rid of credit cards and make clearing debt a priority. My life is so much richer for what I have done and I will never tire of it now.

The only thing that has changed now and has more room for change in the future is my attitude towards work. I no longer want to spend months away from home (letting my poor veggies die in the process) and I am putting a lot of thought into what happens next for me. I want to have a dog, a cat and maybe a couple of chickens. I have had a good 15 years in this profession and have enjoyed a lot of the experiences I have had, but I can see a change coming. Maybe it will take a year, maybe it will take 5 or 10 but I am looking ahead and seeing what possibilities are there. Believe it or not I am already getting long in the tooth, at nearly 40, for the profession I am in – the roles of the 'father' are increasing and the role of the 'lover' diminishing. Like so many other ways in life, sadly the way we look is becoming more important than the way a singer sounds and youth rules. Sad to say, it is generally worse for women, as I know plenty of wonderful sopranos whose careers are coming to a close in their mid 40’s because people want to see someone young on stage (or at least companies believe that this is what people want to see). Commercialism and celebrity culture is infiltrating everywhere and even long established art forms are suffering for it. I am not sure how long I want to be a part of it, but time will tell. I feel that I have made the first leap and I have completely different priorities now than I had 10 years ago.

So what does the future hold for me in my little cottage? Who knows, no point in second guessing it. I have to go to London for 2 months, mid-April and to be honest I have mixed feeling about that. I am so settled here that I don't want to go really, but I know that once I start working I will enjoy myself. I will be staying with very kind friends to keep the cost of living there down, but with the best will in the World, the travel at least will be an unavoidable expense. I have organised friends and family to come and water my plants while I am away, as necessary, although Lancashire weather may just mean that won't be needed. On the other hand my utility usage will go down to nil while I am away. I am able to teach both singing and piano and music theory, so when my present contract is over (October) I am looking into the possibilities of maybe doing some teaching to make some extra cash. I will certainly be taking a local job if I can get one for the 'inbetween contracts' time, I'll turn my hand to anything. 
One thing I do know now, is that I have found the place where I am meant to be and am enjoying the way my life is going, then there is no stopping me. I have loads and loads more to learn. This will be my first year of 'proper' gardening, and I am sure I will make mistakes. I still waste money sometimes and often am annoyed when I think, well that could have paid some money off my mortgage. But the secret is to never beat yourself up over mistakes. Just learn from them and then carry on learning in the process.


Incidentally, I went out to a friends house last night and we had humous and bread and then chicken and chips. There were 2 good sized pieces of chicken left and half a tub of now out of date humous (only by a day) and my friend was chucking them out - so guess who came back with a little tin foil package. Lunch is sorted!


Thank you all for reading and I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

My story, part 2..

Thank you for reading yesterday and for all your nice comments.

I bought my first home with my, then, partner and it was an ex council house that I picked up for a song (£77,000 in the South East with was a real bargain at the time) and was in need of an awful lot of work. I love to get my hands dirty, so I did 100% of the work myself and sold it after 2 years for £110,000. I tried everything and learnt any new skill that I needed by reading books and just giving it a go with patience. Making some money was just a lucky circumstance. Unfortunately we had got into debt because we had had to take a loan out to make up the deposit and our relationship just couldn’t stand the stress, so all in all, I came out of that experience £13,000 richer, but life poorer and more stressed than ever. Shortly after this I bought my flat in London and that was an expense I could, fortunately, at the time afford, although only just. I was comfortable but very discontent in a city I hated. The thing it allowed me to do was to sell up and move here with a small mortgage of only £46,000. Which makes me a very lucky man indeed.

As I have hinted, I had become increasingly sick of people wasting money and began to look back with shame at some of the ways in which I had wasted money in the past. It is so much easier to just do what everyone else does, but I think in this way it is easy to lose perspective on who you really are and what you really need.

I bought some pots and started planting my own veg and to be honest, I think my real journey began when those first green shoots appeared in my tomato plants. It was a revelation to me that I could grow something from a tiny seed that could eventually feed me. I bought a guide to self-sufficiency by Dick Strawbridge and devoured it, borrowed gardening books and read them from cover to cover and a plan took seed, just like those first green shoots of the tomato plants. I had become increasingly depressed and stopped going out much, not just because of the money but because of my hatred for where I lived. I saw that I had to make a long term plan. Being immobile was not an option.

Stage one of my plan happened about 3 years ago, when I started taking driving lessons, I knew that if I was going to live in the country, I had to be able to drive and until then, it had not been necessary. I did this, passed and bought a car.

Stage two was saving, saving and saving some more. I knew that I would have about £37,000 once I had sold my flat, so knew this would buy me nothing in the South East without a wopping mortgage and anyway, deep down I wanted the county I was born in. It was a slow realization. I was born in Lancashire and I am a Northerner at heart and was never meant to live in a Southen city. So lucky for me that house prices are very different in the North than in the South, I could have never done it the other way around. Having said that, I can honestly say that I would move anywhere to have improved my lot. 

And that would be my first piece of advice to anyone wanting to do something similar. Don’t be afraid of moving or trying something new if it could improve your life. Move to a modest home and look at your serious priorities. I think a garden was a top priority for me because it gives me the means to grow my own food, to get my hands in the earth and to build that connection up again with mother nature.There is nothing quite so calming as spending an afternoon working in the garden. My wish list had a sunny aspect garden at the top of the list – I felt it to be more important than the house actually – which made estate agents roll their eyes at me! Next I wanted a fixer upper, learn to do whatever can be done by yourself. Don’t pay someone if you can do something yourself, however busy you are, you can find time, think of all the time you save by not going shopping!

Anyway, back to the story. After passing my driving test, I gave myself 2 years more (was stuck in a fixed rate mortgage) and decided to make myself save another £10,000 in that time – no mean feat on a fairly low income with a mortgage to pay. I literally reduced my spending down to the bare minimum, I learnt how to cook everything from scratch and experimented with learning how to make just about any product that could be bought, from scratch. I tried making baked beans, tomato ketchup, shampoo, washing up liquid (not successful) etc etc, you get the picture. When you begin to break things down to the basics, you realise that most things can be done yourself, for a fraction of the cost – not always cheaper, but mostly.

So second piece of advice, learn to cook! Go to the library and get cookery books, or beg borrow and steal them. Buy a freezer and make large amounts of everything and get it frozen. Never throw a single piece of good food away and if it looks like it might go off, do something with it and freeze it! If you don't need it, don't buy it.

That is the end of part 2 and tomorrow I will post the final part of my short journal.

My story, part 1.,

One of my fairly new followers asked me recently if I had ever written a post about the journey which got me to this little cottage in the North. Of course the blog has been an online journal of that journey over the last 10 or so months, so there is no real individual post about it, so I thought that, despite the possibility of boring you all, I would say a little more about me and how I end up here. Sorry if it is a bit long and rambling, but I won’t be at all offended if you get bored and can’t be bothered to read on much! It is a long post, so I have decided to split it over a few days. First part is a little bit more about me and what I do.

As some of you may know if you’ve read enough of my comments, I have the rather unusual job of being an opera singer. I am, by no means, famous in this field of work, but I am moderately successful, which means basically that I have never had to do anything else to earn my money (except a brief stint as a personal shopper for Tesco when money was tight a few years ago) and that I have only had to accept decent solo parts rather than going into a chorus (which surprisingly pays better than solo work, but which gives less satisfaction). I come from a musical family (mother is a piano teacher, sister is an opera singer) and it was inevitable that I would do music in one form or another, so I got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music when I was 18 (20 years ago) to study piano and soon swapped to first study singing because my voice was ok. When I graduated with a first, I got regular work singing small roles with opera companies and eventually moved onto bigger roles. It may surprise you to learn that an opera singer really doesn’t earn very much (unless you are Kiri te Kanawa). Our time is paid for by performance and the months of rehearsals are done for as little as £300. Yes, that is £300 a month working Monday to Saturday! We are supposed to make up for that when we start the performances. I say supposed to. I have never earned more than £17,000 gross in one year and that was a good year.

The thing about my job is, is that I come in contact with enormous amounts of serious wealth and enormous amounts of waste. At first it was exciting to be at after performance ‘do’s’ that had cost thousands, to be involved in enormously expensive productions. But soon reality takes over and you begin to realise that money should not be wasted like this. To give an example, a few years ago there was a production of an opera that had 2 fully automated animals in it (don’t ask). A big cow and a big horse. Each one had moving mouth, eyes, eyelids tails and feet. And each one cost in the region of £25,000. On the dress rehearsal, the director decided he didn’t like the horse and it was scrapped. Yes, I mean chucked out and never used in a single performance. In the bin. That sort of thing makes me sick (and goes towards the reason why opera tickets are so expensive). Anyway I digress (told you it may be rambling)

The wealth of people who don’t have a clue how ‘real’ people live became a bit sickening to me, although it was a long and slow waking up process. At first I was as guilty as the next person for wanting more, wanting to emulate the lifestyle and spending more than I had, getting myself in debts. But something was changing in my life and in my attitude towards money. Maybe I was growing up or maybe I was just becoming the person I was meant to be.

Will post part 2 tomorrow.

Making my mark

Today I planted my apple tree out in the back garden. I know it will be a few years before it bears fruit, but I will enjoy watching it grow while I do. I can't tell you how much pleasure it gave me working in the garden all afternoon in the lovely warm sunshine that we were blessed with today.
3 neighbours stopped by for a quick chat 'over the garden wall' and one of them told me some of the history of the place, having lived here for over 40 years. As you know, I am on the side of one of the Pennine Hills and just over the brow is a quarry. This would explain all the rocks I hit as I dug down in the ground making the hole for the tree! It is a labour of love pulling out all the stones. I went walking the other day up the hill and past the quarry and here are some picture.

The Rossendale countryside is pretty stunning I think you will agree.

More gardening this weekend if the weather holds.

My new windows and doors

My new windows and doors are installed and I am thrilled, it all looks so wonderful. I am broke now of course, but it is completely worth the scrimping and saving that I will be doing for the next few months.

Lovely new front door

The back of the house.

View from the back bedroom window which I have never seen 'til now

And another

Patio doors from the inside

Front door from the inside

Patio doors open

And from the outside.

What more can I say, I love them and I am very happy. And finally safe from buglers (not that it is a particularly risky location!)